Archive | Food Matters

Bye Bye, Burger

This could very well be the last hamburger I ever eat. Ever since my teen years, even when otherwise a vegan, I’ve had a burger once a month—and you know what time of the month I’m talking about. My menopause dovetailed with the pandemic—nothing like a hormonal shitstorm in an incubation tank—so this is the first burger I’ve needed in months. I celebrated with a whiskey and the premiere of And Just Like That, which leans as hard into the beautiful melancholy of middle age as I do.

I never thought I’d mourn menstruation but over the years I grew grateful for its regulated highs and lows, for a clock and calendar that was my very own. Bidding farewell to my period is bidding farewell to youth, once and for all. And that is proving way harder than I thought, because mortality has never loomed larger. (We’ve all been experiencing that lately.) I send every other middle-aged broad a bite of this burger. We fucking earned it just by sticking around in a world that rarely recognizes how beautiful we are.

Cauldron Cuisine

Before Instagram took the fun out of writing descriptions of the meals I was cooking, before Facebook fully revealed itself as an evil degenerator of democracy, I used to write about the big meals I was cooking, not to show off so much as to metaphorically invite everyone into my kitchen. Tonight I have that same urge. So here’s what.

Short ribs were on massive massive sale at Whole Foods, whose weekly emailer I scan like my grandmother Alice clipped coupons from the Sunday paper. I bought four pounds of them, figuring that as long as it remained cloudy I could pretend it was 45 rather than 65 degrees and freeze the leftovers for colder weeks to come. And so, with Mercury retrograde as the perfect excuse to stay far from the madding crowd, I put on an apron and the Bach cello suites my gran discovered she adored while listening to the radio in her own kitchen.

I salt-and-peppered the ribs, chopped parsnips and potatoes and carrots and onions and garlic, created a braise with horseradish and rosemary and thyme and mustard and tomato paste and vinegar, and filled my apartment–my whole building, really–with the meal she would have fed her family in 1955. When her children were all under one roof, when her husband was working in the textile mills down the street, when her sister lived next door with her two girls and a big apron of her own, when all she had to do was fill a big pot and wind her timer, then tuck in with a juicy novel from another country and century as her family grew all around her.

This time between autumn and winter equinox is always about the ancestors–about the worlds they inhabited and the legacies they left—and it feels good to cook in congress with my line. Another way to say it: I’m grateful to visit my gran.

To tap into your ancestral or personal timeline, book an intuitive reading.

The Longest Sentence, the Creature Comforts

Five Ruby Intuition readings today and now I’m sprawled in a grateful slump across my divan with a certain permakitten’s limbs akimbo, watching Soderbergh’s sunshine noir The Limey while mawing my favorite secret single meal– a blue bowl of fettuccine with home-made mint-ramp-basil-parsley pesto, zest lemon, and greenmarket pea shoots, romaine, and spinach with melted mozzarella, grated parmesan, and fancy Fairway tuna shared, of course, with Grace.

Do not ask me why the bowl has to be blue but my delight plummets when it is not. And tonight I require creature-comfort delight because I’m not feeling great. A member of my family died this week, I’m making big changes behind the curtain I rarely draw back on this platform, and my body is registering all these shifts. Complaining, if you want to know the truth.

So I’m just taking it easy, basking in Terrence Stamp’s cockney rhyming slang and my pregnantladypalate. And of course the sweet soft stripes of Grace’s supermodel paws. The sky is steel, the wind too. Even Soderbergh’s Stamp is melancholy steel. But here in this moment my familiar and I are happily ensconced if not exactly happy.

And thus kicks off what promises to be one of the most oddbot Memorial Day Weekends ever. Not unpleasant, I’m guessing. Just: oddbot. Fitting for a middle-aged medium poised at the beginning of the end.

Also the end of the beginning.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy